Voter Outreach is Getting Harder. Can Political Pros Fix it?

Political operatives and campaign workers are facing an increasingly difficult voter outreach landscape, with traditional canvassing methods failing, in many cases, to produce the level of voter contact that campaigns and committees have relied on for years.

A report released last week by the Democratic-aligned tech incubator Higher Ground Labs laid out what many practitioners see as a stubborn problem for campaigns and committees: While Democratic campaigns and progressive causes reached out to more voters than ever in 2024 – 1.9 billion contact attempts were made on NGP VAN alone – actual contact rates decreased. 

“Fewer voters picked up calls, responded to texts, or engaged at the door, and declining contact rates have meant certain demographic groups have become exceptionally hard to reach,” the report reads.

Younger voters – particularly white and Hispanic men – were “disproportionately unlikely to receive and engage with traditional campaign outreach. Older people, and especially older women of color, “were overrepresented in successful contacts,” the report found.

The findings reflect what many field operatives say has been an endemic challenge for voter outreach in recent years: Time-tested contact methods, like phone banking and door knocking, simply aren’t enough anymore. Voters feel increasingly burnt out and annoyed by frequent political text messages, fewer Americans are willing to answer phone calls from numbers they don’t recognize and many feel uncomfortable with canvassers standing at their front doors.

Other Voter Contact Hurdles

The challenges aren’t only with reaching voters. Last year, in the midst of the 2024 campaign, some field operatives raised concerns that canvassers were submitting a large amount of potentially fraudulent data. At the same time, canvassing vendors grappled with location-spoofing software that allowed some canvassers to appear as if they were knocking doors somewhere they weren’t.

Nathan Bowman, who worked on a field operation in 2024 and now runs Touch Campaigns, said that practitioners need to rethink traditional canvassing and voter contact if they hope to rely on it in future campaigns. 

“There needs to be more creative ways to sustain canvassing,” Bowman said. “It’s just becoming more and more unreliable, and if something doesn’t change dramatically in the way we collect data and have conversations, I frankly don’t see how we can continue to canvas.” 

There are efforts underway to revamp voter outreach, including a handful of available tools intended to support relational organizing – an organizing strategy that effectively encourages supporters to talk to their friends and family about candidates and causes.

Bowman and Gerrit Mora, the owner of creative and paid media firm Tuesday Digital, are also developing a web app called Touchstone that they say eases the onboarding process for canvassers and implements a series of verification requirements that make it more difficult for canvassers to spoof their locations or submit suspect data.

“It’s an uphill battle in a certain sense – just getting people to open the door and be responsive and to have these conversations,” Mora told C&E. “So when we are able to have those conversations, we need to make them easier. We need to be able to capture the data better.”